Xfinity turned YouTube pre-rolls into data price tags

Mobile carriers sell data in abstract gigabytes, so customers rarely connect a plan to a single video. Xfinity Mobile, Comcast's new wireless service, had a concrete pitch: use WiFi hotspots and stop paying cellular data charges — but explaining that in a banner was forgettable.

Goodby Silverstein & Partners instead made the cost concrete. The 'Data in Dollars' campaign computed what each upcoming YouTube video would consume on a smartphone connection and rendered it as a six-second pre-roll price tag: a makeup tutorial cost up to $1.57 in data, a basketball highlight its own amount. The ads matched the genre of the video they preceded.

The mechanic turned a media buy into a product demo. Every video watched through the pre-roll became a working example of the problem Xfinity Mobile solved, in dollars and cents the viewer was about to spend. The pitch was self-demonstrating: see the price, then switch.

The work was shortlisted at D&AD 2019 in the media category, and the idea — turning an ad slot into a live calculation of the viewer's own cost — became a reference point for data-pricing communication.